Here are 10 ways to royally mess up your SEO

Ten Ways to Mess Up Your SEO - I see it and hear it all the time. I speak with potential clients that claim everything was going great and then all of a sudden everything hit the fan. Rankings gone, traffic gone and business down.

Here are 10 ways to royally mess up your SEO:

1. Not asking enough questions

When you hire a search engine optimization company make sure to ask questions on process. Find out to make sure there are no black hat methods being used.

2. Dangerous Linking

A link is good but not everywhere. Linking to the wrong types of websites could land you in the hot seat very quickly. For instance, always strive to have relevant incoming links that could generate visitors to your website, not just a link for the sake of a link.

3. Forgetting to read guidelines

The search engines have strict guidelines they like all websites to follow. Does that mean that some things slip through the cracks? Yes but not for ever. Read through the search engine guidelines to understand what type of approach they like to see.

4. Black hat tricks

Don’t fall prey to cutting corners on your search engine optimization because you could find yourself in a heap of trouble. You may get some sort of search engine penalty, if you do by accident fix it. If the black hat technique was not by accident, then please stop reading this list now!

5. Having disgusting URL structures

Many times people forget to remember about their structure of their URL’s on their website. Don’t forget to keep them as clean as possible.

6. Blanketed meta info

Your meta info for each page should always be nice and unique. Blanketing the same meta title tag across the board is not going to help you long term.

7. Not enough good content

Search spiders are readers not thinkers. If you don’t have enough text they will simply skip over your website. Always have some text for them to grab onto, but always focus on the visitor experience of your site and create good quality content for your visitors.

8. Not enough link building

Link building is something that should be occurring every single month without question. Link building is what gives a website that power it needs to really start climbing through the search results.

9. Image tags

Don’t forget that there is an opportunity to show up in image search on all three search engines and your images need to be optimized for this opportunity.

10. Not using a keyword research tool

You really don’t want to sit there and try to come up with keywords yourself without using a tool because I can guarantee you will not see any search engine optimization benefits. Use a keyword research tool, such as the Google keyword research tool.

These to me are some of the more important areas to watch out for when conducting search engine optimization otherwise you could find yourself going backwards. ( searchengineoptimizationjournal.com )

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